Following a devastating civil war, in 2002 Sierra Leone became a laboratory for justice. For the first time, a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) and a semi-international criminal court operated side by side. But in the context of eleven years of war, a thirty-year legacy of state violence, ongoing structural violence, and deeper memories of colonial rule and slave trades, this justice experiment generated a potentially dangerous doubling of the relationship among verbal testimony, responsibility, and accountability. I explore this doubling and its consequences through two widespread but marginalized forms of knowledge and practice that emerged in the Sierra Leone laboratory: first, rumors connecting the Special Court and the TRC as treacherous doubles with hidden capacities; and second, the embodied performance of apologies before the TRC. Both of these forms recast the responsibility-generating machinery of the Special Court and TRC, decoupling them from the model of liberal progress on which they were based.